The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimin...ation of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conservatism is a positive doctrine; it asserts that certain political institutions--the monarchy, for example--if not divinely or...dained, are at least of absolute validity, and that all our efforts should be directed to maintaining such institutions throughout the variations of our economic fortunes, which are regarded as superficial phenomena. The principles of conservatism are traditional--the handing down from generation to generation of a cultural pattern, expressed in a form that is hieratic or aristocratic. Reactionaryism is a negative doctrine. It vigorously denounces an existing situation--the situation as such--and seeks to establish a contrary situation. It is revolution in reverse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the... historical inheritance of the American Revolution was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of cons...ent and not of rebellion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the worst horror of the Russian Revolution was the letting loose of one hundred million orators, for their passion for talk was... immediately responsible for all the other horrors ...Oratory prevented Russia from becoming a constitutional country. Oratory tore the Revolution from the patriots and gave it into the bloody hands of the mob. Oratory murdered the Czar, his wife, and their innocent children. Oratory almost wiped out the educated classes. Oratory held the stupid populace spellbound while the Germans invaded the country, boosted Lenine [sic] into power, and paved the way for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I never want to hear any more oratory as long as I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So far no actual revolutionary masses have come into view. This might be considered sufficient reason for reproaching someone who ...has set out to describe a revolution. But it is not our fault. This is, after all, a German revolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were fanatical men and women, young and old, all deeply touched by the great rousing call of the revolution, gladly willing t...o fight for the sake of humanity and to sacrifice themselves. There were strangely excited and intense figures among them, believers: believers in this world and utopians who dreamed of eternal peace. And though they were weak and they were few, they towered miles above the miserable figures of the little philistine Ebert and the wooden Noske with his mercenaries, who would soon raise their cudgels and smash them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »